AHHHH!!! We are so excited for our temple!! We watched conference over the internet yesterday. Last conference we had a lot of problems watching it over the internet. Either we would get the wrong session or the broadcast would freeze, etc. Yesterday morning we were late getting conference started because we were talking Grant and Susan. We got it going about 10 min after it started but weren't sure if we had gotten the right session or not. We could tell that he was about to announce temples so we listened to see if we had gotten an old session or the current one. When he announce Philadelphia, Pennsylvania I started screaming and I think I hurt Danny when I grabbed his arm in excitement!
We couldn't be happier right now. I've always lived within 15 minutes of a temple and it has been so hard that almost as soon as I received my endowments we moved to a place where our temple is 3 hours away (or if we chose we could drive to the manhattan temple which is 2 1/2 hours away and pay $65 in tolls, parking, and gas). I'm embarrassed to say that we've only made the trip once. It's hard to take an entire Saturday off for the temple when your husband is ALWAYS studying.
They've already posted on our stake website the address for our new temple, and it's only 10-15 minutes away from us!! The church already owns the land. It's on the outskirts of center city. They were planning on building us a new chapel there for our ward to use, but now they are going to make it a temple/chapel like the one in Manhattan. I'm assuming since our ward was going to meet there before that our ward will still meet there when it's complete. That will bring a whole new meaning to going to church if it's attached to a temple! What a neat experience for us, hopefully. I'm hoping since we already have the land, and it's going to be a small temple that they will finish it quickly. We only have 2 1/2 more years here. I've always wished that I could work and serve in the temple during this time. I don't have kids and Danny is always busy, and this will probably be my only chance for years and years since mothers can't work at the temple while they have children living at home. My prayers have been answered and hopefully we'll be able to have lots of time to enjoy it. The Lord is so good to us!